Studies in Early Mediterranean Poetics and Cosmology

208 Pages·2015·1.46 MB·English

by  Matthew Newman

The Ruins of Paradise: Studies in Early Mediterranean
Poetics and Cosmology

by

Matthew M. Newman

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
(Classical Studies)
in the University of Michigan
2015

Doctoral Committee:

Professor Richard Janko, Chair
Professor Sara L. Ahbel-Rappe
Professor Gary M. Beckman
Associate Professor Benjamin W. Fortson
Professor Ruth S. Scodel
Bind us in time, O Seasons clear, and awe.
O minstrel galleons of Carib fire,
Bequeath us to no earthly shore until
Is answered in the vortex of our grave
The seal’s wide spindrift gaze toward paradise.

(from Hart Crane’s Voyages, II)
For Mom and Dad
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Acknowledgments

I fear that what follows this preface will appear quite like one of the disorderly
monsters it investigates. But should you find anything in this work compelling on account
of its being lucid, know that I am not responsible. Not long ago, you see, I was brought
up on charges of obscurantisme, although the only “terroristic” aspects of it were self-
directed—“Vous avez mal compris; vous êtes idiot.”1 But I’ve been rehabilitated, or
perhaps, like Aphrodite in Iliad 5 (if you buy my reading), habilitated for the first time, to
the joys of clearer prose. My committee is responsible for this, especially my chair
Richard Janko and he who first intervened, Benjamin Fortson. I thank them.
If something in here should appear refined, again this is likely owing to the good
taste of my committee. And if something should appear peculiarly sensitive, empathic
even, then it was the humanity of my committee that enabled, or at least amplified, this,
too.
Richard Janko has not only increased my philological rigor many times over; he
has also inspired me to want to do it for myself. And by means of his learning, he has led
me to those joys and treasures that reside in the µυχοί and at the edges of the ancient
world. Ruth Scodel, both by example and in dialogue, has made me a more sensitive
reader of Homer and Hesiod; even if we diverge widely from one another in our
understanding of parts of these texts, she has helped me to enrich even my misreadings.

1 Searle (1983) relates Foucault’s assessment of Derrida as follows: “Michel Foucault once characterized
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In addition to conducting me toward more legible prose, Benjamin Fortson, who suffered
through reading this project in its extreme infancy (emphasis on its being infans), has
always offered sage advice on vexed linguistic issues, including when it is better to
confess ignorance than to construct Rube Goldberg machines. Gary Beckman, my
cognate member, has been generous with his time and patient with my dilettantism: he
has offered astute corrections to my estimation of ancient Anatolia and its languages.
Finally, Sara Ahbel-Rappe has met me bravely and graciously at the shadowy interface of
poetry and philosophy, where she not only helped me refine the language with which I
talked about ontology and epistemology, but also encouraged me to push my readings
further and to be unafraid of the ineffable.
The Department of Classical Studies at the University of Michigan must also bear
some responsibility for this, since they have funded me without stint and encouraged me,
even in my pursuit of phantasmata. Michelle Biggs, our Graduate Coordinator, has been
unflagging in keeping my colleagues and me intact and on course. Even now she
performs the invaluable job of sending our dossiers out to prospective employers. I am
deeply indebted to her.
H.D. Cameron, too, must be blamed and thanked for what appears, since he
read—with patience and good humor—the entire Iliad and Odyssey with me. This was an
ἔξοχος χαρά.
I thank my peers in the department, current and former, who have been willing to
hear me talk through my ideas, even when I was doing so obscurantly. My cohort—Clara
Bosak-Schroeder, Harriet Fertik, and Ellen Lee (nee Cole), as well as Ellen’s partner,
Evan Robert Lee—have supported me, challenged me, and commiserated with me
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throughout this process. My good friends, Michael Leese (now at the University of New
Hampshire), Amy Pistone, and particularly Matthew Cohn (now at the University of
Toronto), have never shied away from reading or listening to even the most malformed of
my thoughts. I aspire to both their scholarship and their humanity.
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Preface
Otherwise, I will bear some responsibility for what I hope this dissertation can
offer its readers: a new insight into the relationship between poetry (broadly defined),
mythic narrative, and mortal anxiety about the cosmos and the language with which we
describe it. This is an anxiety I have felt deeply since I was very young and realized for
the first time that I ultimately focalized all the narratives of my world, that the God I
prayed to looked suspiciously like Jambi the Genie from Pee-wee’s Playhouse, and that
positive assertions of knowledge unsettled that knowledge. This is an anxiety that I
nurtured in Rome, in the classrooms of 19 via A. Algardi on the Gianicolo, in the park
surrounding the Villa Doria Pamphili, where every day I ran as fast as I could in search of
respite from consumptive yearning, and in the Camposanto Teutonico, where a stray
sarcophagus uttered the mutually consoling words of an ancient Roman couple in banal
elegiac couplets. This is an anxiety I applied stubbornly as a method of reading in a
seminar on Propertius at the University of Michigan. This is an anxiety I detected in the
proem to Parmenides’ hexametric poem ‘On Nature’ and the Goddess’ description of
men’s dikraneia. This is an anxiety I saw ultimately as fueling the oldest extant Greek
poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, and the even older myths from the Near East about
gods, heroes, monsters, and the universes in which they meet one another. Poetry and
myth, it seems, are products of a psychopathology of mortal self-awareness.
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To conclude this section I thank my friends and family outside the field both for
offering sanity (or at least a different kind of insanity) and for earnestly wanting to
understand what it is I work on; I thank dear Cherry, who cares not one wink what I think
about Homer or Hesiod but loves me tirelessly; and I thank my Mom and Dad, to whom
this whole thing is dedicated, because they have loved me and supported without
condition, even at times inconvenient for them. I will forever fall short of adequately
expressing my gratitude to all of them.
Not one to buck trends, I remind my readers that any infelicities herein—and they
are here—are my responsibility.
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Contents

Dedication ii
Acknowledgements iii
Preface vi
Introduction 1

Chapter 1. In His Image (and Language): theomorphization in anthropogonies
1.1. Introduction: The birth of Death 4
1.2. The structures of Hesiod’s myth of races 7
1.3. Gold is best 10
1.4. Not at all like gold 12
1.5. Line 166 14
1.6. The afterlife of heroes 19
1.7. Better than bronze 22
1.8. Speechlessness and unmetricality 27
1.9. Unwitting κοσµόµαχοι 30
1.10. Ἄµουσον γένος 32
1.11. Adam ὁ χρύσεος 36
1.12. Geo- and anthropocentricity 37
1.13. Tending the earth that needs no tending 39
1.14. Features of paradise and the specter of the flood 41
1.15. Living like gods, thinking like gods 44
1.16. The fruits of life and death 47

Chapter 2. Divine trauma, identity theft, and the poetics of ἀκοσµία
2.1. Introduction: From assimilation to obliteration 55
2.2. Serpents as architects of identity theft 58
2.3. Anzu and Illuyanka become Storm-gods: An introduction to the etymological
attack 61
2.4. Ishmael’s crime: The power of names in Genesis 65
2.5. From etymology to image and formula: Hesiodic Typhon 68
2.6. Weapons as vehicles of transference in ps.-Apollodorus 74
2.7. More simulacra and metepithesis: Nonnus 80
2.8. Synthesis: Re-writing the cosmos from Anzu to Nonnus 82
2.9. A telling slip: Zeus’ neura in Nonnus 87
2.10. A brief look forward: the tragic consequences of wordplay 89
2.11. An Erinyomachy in Aeschylus? 90
2.12. Precocious mortals: Sophocles’ Trachiniae 102
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2.13. Preliminary conclusions 110

Chapter 3. The dangers of (being) Aphrodite
3.1. Introduction and synthesis 113
3.2. Aphrodites: Apostasis and syntasis 115
3.3. Powerful garments, ME’s, and τιµαί: Some correspondences 118
3.4. Transgression: The rescue of Aeneas 124
3.5. Image and echo: A verbal defense 126
3.6. Violating the inviolable: Wounding the goddess 131
3.7. Blood that is not blood: Healing the goddess 135
3.8. Divine wounds as musical oppression 137
3.9. Consolations: Reorienting the goddess 138
3.10. Consolations: Paradeigmata of suffering 142
3.11. Dione’s threats and Diomedes as guarantor of Zeus’ reign 154

Chapter 4. Immortal desire and mortal grief
4.1. Introduction: Aphrodite and eros 160
4.2. Maternal grief 162
4.3. Divine suicide? 169
4.4. …ὃ καὶ θανάτου ῥίγιον ἀργαλέου 181

Conclusion 187

Bibliography 192

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